1. Field of Invention
The invention relates generally to the field of networked computer systems. More particularly, methods for maintaining the operation of these systems in the event of component failures, application errors, middleware errors, or operating system errors.
2. Description of Relevant Art
To maintain the operation of computer networks in many areas of computer use is becoming increasingly important. Communications, banking, Internet servers, and other 24-hour services rely on continuous, dependable computing in order to be successful. One of the early highly available systems was a fault tolerant system that used multiple processors, run in lockstep, that continually compared outputs and if there was a discrepancy between the two then that occurrence was designated a “fault” and the processing was switched over to another processor cell. There are also other schemes that vendors use in purely hardware fault tolerant systems. However, since many failures are caused by software related issues it's important to have a process that can handle these types of failures and that can seamlessly and quickly switch over the duties of the failed software to other running software. Current art provides a number of proprietary systems that are designed to run on particular operating systems and that support specific types of network resources. The present invention contains the flexibility to be incorporated across a variety of operating systems and it can be configured to support multiple types of resources and resource applications.